Competitive Exams

What is a blood relation problem in reasoning tests?

Short answer

A blood relation problem gives you a series of family relationships in words and asks you to work out how two specific people are related, often by tracking the relationships through a family tree.

These questions test your ability to track multiple relationship statements simultaneously and correctly determine an indirect connection.

A worked example

Statement: Pointing to a man, a woman says, "His mother is the only daughter of my mother." How is the woman related to the man?

Solution: "The only daughter of my mother" means the woman herself (since she has no sisters). So "his mother" = the woman. That means the woman is the man's mother.

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Last reviewed: September 2026